ning on the Nascar circuit. One morn- ing in the shower, Saunders decided that Warner needed a bluegrass cam- paign jingle. He composed lyrics on the spot, and put them to the tune of the D . ll d ' " D I " 1 ar s song 00 ey : Mark Warner is ready To lead our Commonwealth. He'll work for mountain people And economic health! Get ready to shout it From the coal mines to the stills Here comes Mark Warner- The hero of the hills! The jingle became a small sensation during the campaign, and Warner won fifty-two per cent of the vote in the southwestern district. In office, Warner repaid the region by persuading two high-tech companies to move to Leba- non, and fought to get Virginia T ech- Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in the Blue Ridge town of Blacksburg-into the Atlantic Coast Conference. "Mark Warner has become part of the culture," Saunders says. 'We accept him as part of who we are, if for no other reason-God damn, he got V.P.I. into the A.C.C.! I mean, it's a big damned deal." Saunders worked as a senior strate- gist in John Edwards's Presidential cam- paign, and is now following Obamà s with a critical eye. He worries that Obama seems too professorial, too de- tached, to make headway with rural vot- ers. "I never thought I would see Hillary Clinton being defined as pro-gun and anti-trade, and a black guy being con- sidered an élitist down here." Obamàs "Change" message, Saun- ders argues, is too abstract, too vague, for the region. "Those people you were with today were screwed by the English in Scotland and Ireland way before they came over here and started getting screwed," he said. "They've been screwed since the dawn of time. And you know what? You ain't gonna do anything with them, talkin' about change. You know why? We're all changed out. That's all you ever hear, every election. Some- body's gonna change some shit. Nothin' ever changes. We get fucked." Saunders was eager to hear about the distinctly populist message Obama had delivered in Lebanon, but when I men- tioned the "lipstick on a pig" line he stopped grinning. "That quote might come back to burn his ass up," Saunders d " D . h d '.'" muse. sIng t e wor pIg... If John Edwards were the nominee, he would certainly be pounding home the greed message. That message, Saunders said, "would be beatin' the hell outtaJohn McCain right now." He went on, "And the reason is, is because John said, Enforce the antitrust laws that have decimated us. He said we're gonna make the playing field level, that the American workers are the most productive workers in the world still- let's put' em back to work. We've traded local economies for Wall Street divi- dends. That's all that's happened. Since the dawn of time, the big sons ofbitches kicked the little sons of bitches' ass. And that's what's happenin' now. I mean, it's a time to fight. I mean, anybody who doesn't think we have a problem with eco- nomic disparity, it's the worst it's been since the eighteen-eighties. And the redistribution-of-the-wealth argument? I love it when a Republican says to me, 'The Democrats wanna redistribute the wealth.' Well, there's been a redis- tribution of wealth-but it's the other fu ki ' I" C n way. It is advice that the Obama cam- paign is hearing quite a lot, and by last week Obama was warning against a "welfare program for Wall Street," and reproaching finance-industry executives for "greed and irresponsibility." Rick Boucher, a Democrat who rep- resents southwestern Virginia in the House, has estimated that if Obama gets forty-five per cent of the vote there, he'll win in Virginia. That means Obama would have to improve upon John Ker- ry's performance by six points. I asked whether a black man could do that well. Saunders insisted that race was not the deciding issue. "That's what burns me up, when they talk about racism down here in the hills," he said. 'We vote for blacks. Roanoke City is twenty-seven per cent black and we had a black mayor"- Noel C. Taylor-"for nearly twenty years, a Republican mayor, who was a preacher and a good man. Liberal as hell." Saunders also noted that Virginia was the first state to elect a black gover- nor, L. Douglas Wilder. In 1989, Wilder won with the help of the southwest, which gave him forty-eight per cent of its votes. If Obama loses Virginia, Saunders says, it will be because he didn't succeed in breaking down cultural barriers. Obama's famous remark, made at a fund-raiser in San Francisco, that rural voters are bitter, which causes them to cling to religion and guns, lingers in the heartland. "I don't pray because of re- sentment-I pray because it makes my life better," Saunders says. "I don't have a gun because of resentment-I've got a gun because I've always had one. I don't ever remember not having a gun of ki d " some n. Obama has now visited southwest Virginia twice, and may return again. He has opened eight campaign offices in the area. McCain has one. Obama won't be sponsoring a Nascar racer, but Saunders said that there is something else that Obama could do. "He needs to go sit down with Jim Webb for a while, and talk to him about the power of the culture, and how it works." A wall in Jim Webb's Washington office is filled with a collection of archival photographs, the centerpiece of which is a striking black-and-white por- trait captioned "Appalachian Man." The photograph's anonymous subject is a workingman who could be forty or sixty. His weathered face, vaguely hand- some beneath a thick felt hat, is fixed in a glare suggesting skepticism, even dis- dain. Whoever Appalachian Man was, his image has found the perfect setting. Webb has been thinking and writing about such people for forty years. When he turned to writing after serving as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, he became obsessed with the American cul- tural divide, and the fact that his people, the Scots-Irish, stood so firmly on one side. The descendants of the Ulster war- rior clans that settled the Appalachian frontier were a proud, ornery lot, deeply patriotic and always ready for a fight. They invented country music, fostered the form of democracy named for their kinsman Andrew Jackson, and supplied generals on both sides of the Civil War. In "Born Fighting," his 2004 book about the Scots-Irish influence in American life, Webb summarized the culturè score ethos: Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray. Webb has cast himself on both sides of the cultural divide. Mter Vietnam, he began identifying himself as a Republi- THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 6, 2008 39